12/19/2005

I updated the CSeries headers on this site.  The contents won't work with the old OD-src snapshot, but it should work better on everything else.

The last version of PictFontier (1.0.2) is available.  It is far better than 1.0.1.  There is no longer that unreasonable text limit.  You can pretty much just copy-and-paste text -- it only requires that CRs are used instead of LFs; it never needed to be complete MacRoman text.

It appears that the new X-Box 360 is the must have (and must incapacitate anybody in the way) for X-Mas.  Heh, X-Box for X-Mas.  Crappy Holidays!

I can�t blame anybody for not having much intrest in what I�ve made.
I can certainly blame the government for putting me further in the financial hole.

...And relying on labels to make expectations is just plain stupid.
  ...but that�s the excuse in blurring the lines to make the rich richer.   Take that, Fox News!

   12/14/2005

First thing: the snapshot I released was not  a full release of the code.  It was a "snapshot", and it was not actually compilable at the time.  I don't want to embarass myself by releasing code that may have had some leagal problems only before  the Trilogy became freeware.  Second thing: I don't have the money to upload the source the same way the Aleph One guys can.  It's not because I'm just being secretive.

Okay, as I said the previous time (and I don't mean to be rude): don't go off compiling the source snapshot.  There have been some dynamic changes to the runtime structures, including changing the tick-base to 120tps (monsters have their own periods of processing, so they don't slow the game down), updating "machine_ticks" to "machine_milliseconds", and world_distance to a "fixed"... etc.  The engine should still be able to convert the older formats to the new at runtime (quickly), but you will need a lot more RAM to run version 0.2 of Old Durandal.  My goal is similar to Marathon: Resurrection's, updating the engine to something newer and reasonable -- but I'm going for runability on older computers (and trying not to make it look completely different).  A number of changes have also been made for the cseries headers (for performance reasons on non-M68k computers).

One of the main performance drags on the program was the large GWorld being moved around in memory -- I should've just moved it's handle to the top and locked it (or something like that).

It appears that I may have done something really, really stupid at SourceForge.  Laugh all you want.  I don't have the time to react, as I don't have many options, as I'm struggling, here.

It appears that there are a few people looking at porting Marathon: Durandal to Palm.

   11/30/2005

I had to remove a few tasteless lines, but, here. ASAP has resulted in no sleep.

   11/28/2005

After scanning the marathon-devel SourceForge mailing list (I unsubscribed some time ago), it appears that people are having problems compiling the source code snapshot because the cseries code is... what?! This is some bullshit, right here. I meant for my own take on the cseries code to be universal, and should work for making other things. I'm gonna release something of it -- ASAP. -- unless there's another holiday in the way. Please be aware that what they were talking about was just the source code snapshot, and that the Old Durandal code is not completely ready.

   11/23/2005

Happy Spanksgiving! -- where the Pilgrims spanked the Indians with their muskets. And since the Indians, with their sharpshooting abilities at handling arrows, were able to defeat the musket bullets flying in all directions (ya can't do much with those inferior takes-forever-to-reload weapons), the Pilgrims and the Indians decided to truce and come together for Thanksgiving -- maybe.

   11/17/2005

And after nearly four months of no internet (my choice), all I can say is....
Blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.................................................
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I'm finally getting serious about the math in 3D triangle rendering as far as diagonal line rendering.... and I am still struggling with developer problems (inadequate software with no money). Why should I drone on about this mess? Because I exist and I am imperfect. JUST LIKE EHVY BAHDY ESS!

I am now developing a universal assembler/disassembler using an instruction set data format... adding stuff along the way. And to platform off, I am using - of course - HyperXDB as the shell for it (with externals/inline code). Old Durandal looks screwed...

Happy Halloween! Happy Veterans' Day! Happy whateverelse!

Me tardy.

   7/25/2005

Here you go: a snapshot of the Old Durandal 28-6 source code for mid July.  Hello? Is anybody there? I've pretty much maxed out my cramped 15MB of space of this Geocities domain thing.

   7/12/2005

The skull images on the map review page have been shrunken from 32 pixels in height to 30.  They have also been minimized to at most 5KB.

The new scripting system I'm developing for my software uses a stack type similar to RoboWar.  Instead of 16 bit integers representing everything, every data stack entry is a 16 byte "dual_value".  It starts with a 64-bit 'double'.  And for the format to represent things other than numbers, the 'double' has to be zero - where in that case, if the next 64 bits aren't zero, it means something other than a number.  When the 'double' isn't zero, then the second 64 bits represent a clipped UInt64 (zero when the 'double' is either negative or not real and all bits set when the value is too large).  Other than the data stack is the link stack.  The link stack carries the previous line/instruction offset, as well as where the data stack was.  Every link entry also contains certain other details to make the parser easier to write (I'm writing it from scratch!).

   7/6/2005

Most Marathon screen shots have been minimized in file size, and little image quality has been lost for the ones that had to be recompressed. Also, I have made new skull images with the skull inventory image on my map review page.  To make sure that they are tiny in file size, they have been made 256 color GIFs.  They are a little too tall... maybe I should shrink them a little more vertically.

I've recently downloaded POV-Ray 3.6 (alpha version), and it is amazing.  Expensive studio like rendering in a freeware package; photon simulation, much improved radiosity feature...  Version 3.6 is supposed to be a more stable version than 3.5 (less memory leakage).

   6/30/2005

Cringely June 9th sheds some light on why Apple may be turning to Intel - or the other way around - and the possibility that Intel hates Microsoft.

Because I don't have a client server, I may just have to remove the Old Durandal project from SourceForge.  If anyone can show that it is possible to handle the project files through http/asp (I doubt it), E-mail me.  I'll give my zero audience a week... then that's it.  I've got to be one of the least popular site-things out there (Yahoo! GeoCities is the site).  A week is nothing- it's been about a month since anyone has viewed this page.  And to anyone who doesn't know that the Marathon page has moved to /marathon/index.html, there it is.

Some of the images in the images directory will be recompressed to conserve web space... some people are a little too serious (live a little!).

   6/23/2005

Apple will be using Intel processors, summer of 2006?!  What the f**k is goin' on?  'Looks like Steve Jobs is desperate, or something (IBM has been struggling with financing the G5 processor and Apple has issues with getting things up-to-date internally).

Well, after playing ZDoom on a new dirt cheap computer I bought with the birthday money (that PC I was talking about the other day), it got my hopes up about my project.  Look at how successful ZDoom is!  And the base technology (official Linux source code for Doom II) is cheaper than Marathon's.  I'm doing now what I should've done instead of adding stupid cheat codes; I'm writing scripting code.  It's a customized code base similar to Lua, but it adds some of the things in Bare C, the experimental coding language had that I worked on some years ago.  The parser has taken days to even reach a prototype (my methods were requiring a lot of code, and I am lazy).

   6/13/2005

After being completely inactive for more than a week, my blood pressure has become dangerously high.  The world wide web is indeed a cold place.  You cannot trust anyone's (or anything's) "words".  You can trust me, however.  (Another) However, you can bet I will crack under pressure.  Pretty much the only thing that makes me unreliable is lack of conviction when... when I'm alone.  Life is very, very, very, very tricky.

I have issues that will never disappear.  And I've already stated them (in general).

I have found every secret in DOOM II, but have not been able to get to one without turning clipping off.  I can't tell you what I feel after accomplishing this because don't feel much of anything anymore... I just wouldn't know what to say, well enough.

In less than 24 hours ago, I've tested Old Durandal (the modified old build) on a Pentium II based machine using Basilisk II (using late birthday money from relatives that actually have money), and the first thing I saw was that the emulator is inconsistent at speed (especially since the code base in the build causes the program counter to jump all over the place).  The second thing I realized was that the 16 bit entries were fixed -- you cannot do fading effects without doing it by software. The technology in Marathon is old enough that... **sigh** .. Maybe I should just give up on Marathon altogether.  Even though I haven't heard anyone say specificly that they want me to leave the genre, nobody has spoken directly to me for a long time.

   4/21/2005

The SourceForge project is 38 days old, and no files have been added to the CVS.  Why?  BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL I'M DOING!  The project (on SourceForge) will stay the way it is as long as no one actually cares.  There.

   4/4/2005

I have no friends, no job, no money; that's why everything is so slow around here!  Please, somebody talk to me for spite, FOR ONCE!  And no chat-room junk, 'cause they are terrible; the only thing people say in them are things like "f**k you!", and "let me see th-" - okay, I can't actually say it... but you know what I'm saying -- or maybe not.

The Pope has died (which was expected eventually), and even though I'm not a religous person, it did have an impact on me.  Especially since the cable news has become almost useless now because they won't stop talking about the Vatican, and continue to do a lot more late-night live coverage (something Fox News rarely does at all - except for maybe that "War Alert" bullshit).  I know very well that not many people will see this, and that people don't care about my honesty -- some people don't even think I'm being honest at all.

This site will be compacted a little.  All versions of some of the discontinued downloadable projects will be compressed into just one file for each project to reduce unused space, and also reduce file compression overhead; StuffIt has never been that great when it comes to compressing multi-media.

   3/14/2005

I've done something I might regret.  I registered a project for Old Durandal.  UNIX-Name: OD28-6 -- which stands for June 28 of 2004 - the backup date of the source code backup that Old Durandal is currently based on.  A rejection might be better in my case.
I want to make it a 3-D engine, but I'm not intelligent enough for the math - both statistical and rendering-wise.  The stuff I want to implement is behind the time as it is, as Aleph One has never gotten that far as the big guys in promoting the engine.  I've recently unsubscribed to their mailing list because I find it almost useless.  Things will be created, and things will be destroyed.

In gaming news, the well-anticipated Half-life 2 features realistic physics.  I suck.

   3/2/2005

After hacking out the "media bounds" Infinity projectile flag code, I've been working on the test map, and trying to fudge around with Anvil and Forge (from the Trilogy Release), adding a number of textures -- I'm trying to get this shtuff to look good... and 8 bit graphics kind'a suck. I've doing a lot of thought about the project (especially in comparison to Aleph One). Again, I don't have the computer equipment to do much of anything (the typical Amiga machine would probably give more performance than this FPU-less Macintosh). So little has been done that this project will turn one year old in just a week or so. isqrt has now been made into hex inline (with an external table), so now the most optimized assembly function for square root I've ever made is now incorporated into the map_world source file. The older one that was in the first release did not produce accurate results -- one of the reasons why Infinity films did not work right - and two (including the projectile flag) should now be fixed.

   2/22/2005

quadruple_screen, copy_screen, and transparent_texture_vertical_lines have been reoptimized -- all of the 68K assembly files will be incorporated into the C files as hex inline. And now that I have the timings for the 68040, Old Durandal should be well optimized in the next release.
Film->QuickTime Movie is on the way... and I'm looking to see if I can transform Old Durandal into a real 3D game (sloping polygons on 68K!).

Why did they not make the Infinity app. available by itself? I need the projectile source code!

   2/12/2005

There was a bug with "lightsource.c", and the current modified old release will try to jump to address zero (PC=0) if you try to start a game after OD has started up (including double-clicking the saved game). To prevent this from happening, start a game first, exit, then run the saved game.
There is also a problem with Infinity files not being recognized (because of the Infinity WAD file version). To temporarily fix this problem, change the WAD file version - the very first 2 byte integer in the map - to $0002.

The power outage here in Maine - due to a snow storm - has slowed things down a little (no electricity for nearly two days!).

   2/7/2005

There. The official development release with the bug fixes is up. It's still the same thing that was up here, but there were more changes to the program's resources, including the code resources, and default extension definition resources, to get it to a state more like the source code right now. After taking off the back of the monitor, I found the CRT and the field wire to the CRT is all stained, and I'm running out the rest of the monitor's life to get this shtuff done; I still have to get a new monitor. Who'd knew that it'd been releasing deadly gasses this whole time.

Pict Fontier has been updated as well - you may have to update a dialog thing in the source code for it to fully work on render-image save.

   2/4/2005

Looks like I won't get anything on my birthday again. Thanks a lot, bastids. Another bug in the release is a divide by zero in sound. That should've been fixed, but the source code is still not in a compilable state...

   2/1/2005

There are two big bugs in the release. It deals with Async calls and later versions of the system software (there may be a bug in 7.5 with treating PBReadAsync as a sync call). The other problem is with the preferences being created. I will upload a version with changes as soon as I can get a new f**king monitor - this will probably take weeks or months; the monitor is almost dead.

   1/14/2005

I'm sorry I couldn't upload it before 2005 hit, but IT IS UP! The first (partially legal) release of Old Durandal. You will have to E-mail me directly for the encryption password.